The Blog

Tara Ison – Award-Winning Author

Apr 11, 2023 | Featured Author

Debbie Harpham

tara-ison

from author’s website

Tara Ison is the author of the novels The List (Scribner), A Child out of Alcatraz (Faber & Faber, Inc.), a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Rockaway (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press), featured as one of the “Best Books of Summer” in O, The Oprah Magazine, July 2013. Her essay collection, Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies, Winner of the PEN Southwest Book Award for Best Creative Nonfiction, and her short story collection Ball, were both published in 2015 by Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press. 

At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf, a novel of life in WWII collaborationist France, is forthcoming from Ig Publishing in February 2023.

Her short fiction, essays, poetry and book reviews have appeared in Tin House, O, The Oprah Magazine, Salon, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Nerve.com, Black Clock, TriQuarterly, PMS: poemmemoirstory, Publisher’s Weekly, The Week magazine, The Mississippi Review, LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, and numerous anthologies. She is also the co-writer of the cult movie Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead. 

She is the recipient of 2020 and 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a 2008 COLA Individual Artist Grant, as well as multiple Yaddo fellowships, a fellowship at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, a Rotary Foundation Scholarship for International Study, a Brandeis National Women’s Committee Award, a Thurber House Fiction Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, the Simon Blattner Fellowship from Northwestern University, and a California Arts Council Artists’ Fellowship Award. Ison received her MFA in Fiction & Literature from Bennington College. She has taught creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Goddard College, Antioch University Los Angeles, and UC Riverside Palm Desert’s MFA in Creative Writing program. She is currently Professor of Fiction at Arizona State University.

ABOUT AT THE HOUR BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF:

At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf is the story of a twelve-year-old Parisian Jewish girl in World War II France, living “in hiding” as a Catholic orphan with a family in a small village.

When Danielle Marton’s father is killed during the early days of the German Occupation, her mother sends her to live in a quiet farming town near Limoges in Vichy France. Now called Marie-Jeanne Chantier, Danielle struggles to balance the truth of what’s happened to her family and her country with the lies she must tell to keep herself safe. At first, she’s bitter about being left behind by her mother, and horrified at having to milk the cow and memorize Catholic prayers for church. But as the years pass and the Occupation worsens, Danielle finds it easier to suppress her former life entirely, and Marie-Jeanne becomes less and less of an act. By the time she’s fifteen and there is talk amongst the now divided town of an Allied invasion, not only has Danielle lost the memories of her father’s face and the smell of her mother’s perfume, but her very self, transforming into a strict Catholic and an anti-Semitic, fervent disciple of fascism.

Available for purchase here.

PRAISE AND RECOGNITION FOR AT THE HOUR BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF:

“Brilliant, timely, and chilling.”—People 

“[A] piercing Holocaust novel…There are costs to living a lie, and there’s madness in forgetting…Beneath the bucolic scenes of Tara Ison’s novel are foreboding realities. Neighbors turn against neighbors; fascism creeps up; ‘good’ people avert their eyes…Even at the novel’s gripping end…[there are] questions about what moral compromises are the acceptable cost of survival.”—Foreword Reviews (starred review)

“A Jewish girl comes of age in Vichy France, relentlessly deformed by the spiritual rot of her era…Ison is unflinching in her depiction of the self-inflicted corruption that replaces the character’s moral core with a twisted version of Christianity, brilliantly illustrating the epigraph from Solzhenitsyn: ‘To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.’…Free of sentiment but not without hope of redemption, this is a suspenseful and chilling story.”—Kirkus (starred review)

“A chilling psychological portrait of a young Jewish girl hiding in France during WWII…Finely drawn characters and scenes of rural life complement Ison’s unique vision and original spin on a familiar set-up. This challenging work stands out among historical fiction of the period.”—Publishers Weekly

“Tara Ison’s first novel was a finalist for the LA Times Book Awards. Another made The Oprah Magazine’s ‘Best Books of Summer List.’ This winter we can’t wait to get our hands on her latest…A disturbingly timely story.”—Los Angeles Daily News

“Marie-Jeanne Chantier is a young French Catholic girl with a secret. She’s not really Catholic, and her name isn’t Marie-Jeanne Chantier at all. In reality, her name is Danielle Marton, and she’s a Jew hiding in the French countryside during the Nazi occupation of France…Read if you’re into psychological drama and cottagecore.”—Hey Alma

“A suspenseful and disturbing psychological story of an adolescent Jewish girl, relocated from Paris to a small village in Vichy during WWII and hiding with a Catholic family, who becomes increasingly and dangerously aligned with her invented identity.  Written in exquisite prose, Tara Ison’s novel of persona, identity and survival in collaborationist France is chilling and profoundly moving.”—JANET FITCH, author, White Oleander and Paint it Black

At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf is a thrilling novel, not just as a splendid read but as a deeply resonant work of art driven by the central yearning in the greatest literary narratives: the yearning for a self, for an identity, for a place in the world. Tara Ison has always been a writer I’ve ardently admired. Here she is at the height of her estimable powers.”—ROBERT OLEN BUTLER, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Paris in the Dark

“Tara Ison’s riveting historical novel, At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf, takes the reader into Vichy France in the early 1940s at the moment when ordinary life shifts into complicity with horror, as the Free French government first accommodates the Nazi regime then amplifies its fascist, anti-Semitic project. Told from the perspective of a young Jewish girl grappling with identity, Ison’s timely book considers that moment between dusk and night, the almost imperceptible shift into darkness, both political and personal, as it exposes the high cost of accommodation of evil and bigotry. Provocative, vivid, and affecting, this novel will inspire important conversations that we all need to be having now.”—EJ LEVY, author of The Cape Doctor

AUTHOR VISITS:

Author visits with Tara Ison are available via staging.novelsandbox.com/our-authors/.